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Teleport: SSH server for clusters and teams

Apr 12, 2016
by
Taylor Wakefield

Gravitational’s end goal is to help people manage their applications on
multiple locations. Our flagship product
Telekube solves two main challenges -
deploying applications across multiple environments and then once they are
there, operating and maintaining them. The second challenge requires an access
layer that is compatible with existing (mostly SSH-based) workflows and
scalable across multiple clusters of servers and multiple ops teams.

Gravitational Teleport is that access
layer. And today we are excited to announce that we are open sourcing this
fundamental component of the Telekube Platform.

Teleport was built with security and usability across distributed environments
as the primary design principles. We made Teleport compatible with OpenSSH so
it works with many existing systems and work flows with minimal changes. Beyond
traditional SSH, we added features to make it secure and easy to use for teams
with modern, distributed applications, including:

Two-factor authentication

Short-lived certificates

Dynamic labeling for services

Multi-user sessions (“hangouts for terminal”)

The ability to playback sessions

Mandatory auditing (every event is recorded and stored)

A web-based user interface (in addition to the CLI)

More Info

You can learn more about Teleport’s design and internals at its landing
page and Github
repository. It is not ready for
production use, yet, but we encourage people to review, play with it and
provide feedback. We are currently undergoing a security review and will update
the repo’s README.md when we are comfortable recommending it for production
use.